traffic management Archives - ClickFunnels

How To Grow An Email List Starting From Scratch

John Parkes — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 13:52:00 +0000

The post How To Grow An Email List Starting From Scratch appeared first on ClickFunnels.

You have probably heard about the importance of building an email list. But how can you grow one from scratch?

That’s exactly what we are going to discuss today!

Table of Contents:

Should You Wait Until You Have Something to Sell to Start Building Your Email List?

No!

You should start building your email list ASAP, even if you don’t have a product or service to sell yet. Why?

Because growing an email list doesn’t take that much time in terms of the work that you need to put in every week.

But it will probably take you several years to reach “escape velocity” where your newsletter starts gaining momentum and your subscriber growth begins accelerating.

The sooner you start building your email list, the sooner you’ll get to that point. And once you do have something to sell, you’ll have an audience to sell it to!

When bestselling author Ryan Holiday was in his early 20s, people who were aware of the fact that he was a bookworm kept asking him for book recommendations.

Eventually, he decided to start a monthly newsletter. Every month, he sends one email with a list of 5 to 10 books and a short, few-sentence review for each book. Since 2009, Holiday has recommended over 3,000 books that he has personally read.

It’s probably safe to say that having an email list played a significant role in his success as an author. When he released his first book “Trust Me, I’m Lying” back in 2012, he already had an audience that he could promote his book to.

Presumably, each subsequent book launch was easier than the previous one because his email list kept growing. Today it has over 250,000 subscribers.

It’s also worth noting that Holiday was reading around 250 books per year anyway. So picking out the ones he liked the most every month, writing up a few-sentence review for each book and sending it out as a newsletter didn’t require a big time investment. But it did offer outsized returns!

Ask yourself: is there something that you are already doing anyway that you could leverage to build your email list?

Ryan Holiday with a stack of books.

Newsletters: The Easiest Way to Grow an Email List from Scratch

It’s important to strike the right balance between emailing your subscribers often enough to build trust and stay top of mind with them, but not so often that they get tired of your emails and stop opening them.

Newsletters are a perfect solution because by definition a newsletter requires you to email your subscribers at regular intervals, typically, either daily, weekly, or monthly.

Moreover, if someone subscribed to your newsletter, it means that this concept appeals to them, so they will likely continue opening your emails as long as the content quality remains high.

Regardless of what you are selling at the moment or intend to sell in the future, you can probably come up with a concept for a newsletter that will allow you to build an email list of potential customers.

It’s probably safe to say that link roundups can work well for most industries:

Do you write detective novels? Start a newsletter where you share links to the latest releases and a short review of each book.
Do you have an e-commerce store that sells women’s clothes and accessories? Start a newsletter where you share links to interesting fashion, style, and beauty content from around the web.
Do you run a SaaS company that sells productivity software? Start a newsletter where you share links to interesting productivity content from around the web and review productivity books.

…etc.

Building an Audience of Potential Customers vs. Building an Audience of Your Peers

Something to consider here is that your newsletter should appeal to your potential customers as opposed to your peers who are doing the same thing as you.

For example, while authors who write detective novels tend to also read detective novels, the vast majority of people who read books in this genre aren’t writers.

So if your aim is to build an audience that you could then promote your detective novels to, it makes sense to focus on content that will be interesting to the readers of this genre as opposed to its writers.

Of course, if your aim is to build an info product business where you teach aspiring novelists how to write detective novels, then it makes sense to share links related to writing, publishing and book marketing in your newsletter. But that’s a completely different business.

We are emphasizing this because sometimes people start building an audience of their peers instead of an audience of potential customers and then struggle to monetize it because they didn’t think things through!

What are the Best Practices When it Comes to Email Newsletters?

Brian Dean has a proven track record of building email lists:

With his previous business Backlinko he grew the company newsletter to over 250,000 subscribers.
With his current business Exploding topics he grew the company newsletter to over 90,000 subscribers.

Here are some of the best practices that he recommends if you want to grow your email newsletter:

A branded newsletter is a newsletter that has its own unique brand that is separate from the personal or the company brand.

The example that Brian provides is Tim Ferriss’ newsletter “5-Bullet Friday” which has its own separate brand and over 1.5 million subscribers.

The reason he recommends having a branded newsletter is that they are easier to share.

If you tell a friend:

“You should sign up for Tim Ferriss’ newsletter!”

It’s easy to forget, especially if your friend doesn’t know who Tim Ferriss is and therefore might struggle to remember his full name.

Meanwhile, if you tell that same friend:

“You should sign up for the ‘5-Bullet Friday’ newsletter!”

They will probably be more likely to remember its name and subscribe to it.

It’s also helpful if your newsletter’s name explains what the subscribers can expect from it, as is the case with “5-Bullet Friday”.

If you look at the most popular newsletters in the world, they tend to be focused on providing bite-sized value.

“5-Bullet Friday” is the most obvious example here: Tim Ferriss sends out a new issue every Friday where he shares five things that he found interesting.

Typically, it’s a combination of content recommendations, product recommendations, and a quote that he’s been pondering that week. Occasionally he also throws in some news about what he’s up to.

This template means that you can open a new issue of Tim’s newsletter, quickly scan it to see what this week’s bullets are about and then read it more closely if something catches your eye.

Moreover, it also means that when you see a new “5-Bullet Friday” issue in your inbox, you know what you going to get, you just don’t know the details.

Brian argues that this combination of the familiar and the unknown is a powerful motivator and a great way to get your subscribers to open your emails.

He uses the same approach with his own “Exploding Topics Tuesday” newsletter – every new issue covers four trends.

These trends are all over the place, from bamboo pajamas to security posture management, but the newsletter template remains the same!

You want to create a dedicated newsletter page and add it to your website’s navigation bar.

Here’s the homepage of Brian’s software company Exploding Topics:

If you click on the “Newsletter” tab in the navigation bar, you will be taken to the “Exploding Topics Tuesdays” landing page where you can sign up for the newsletter:

According to Brian, most people who sign up for the “Exploding Topics Tuesdays” newsletter do so through this page!

#4: Sending a “Confirmation and Deliverability” Welcome Message

You should send the “confirmation and deliverability” (CD) welcome message to each new subscriber the moment they sign up for your newsletter.

As its name suggests, the purpose of this message is twofold:

Confirmation

You want to confirm that they have successfully subscribed to your newsletter and reassure them that they made the right choice by telling them what they can expect from you going forward.

Deliverability

You want to get them to take an action that would signal to email service providers like Gmail that they want to get emails from you.

Initially, Brian would ask new subscribers to move the CD message from the “Promotions” tab to their primary inbox in Gmail.

He would also ask them to reply to the CD message and let him know what was the #1 thing that made them decide to check out this newsletter.

Now he has moved to encouraging new subscribers to click the link within the CD message and read the previous issue of the newsletter.

All three approaches can help you improve your deliverability. After all, new subscribers interacting with your welcome message in some way lets email service providers know that people are interested in hearing from you.

That can reduce the likelihood of your emails landing in the “Promotions” tab or being flagged as spam.

(Though the latter shouldn’t be happening anyway if you are using good email marketing software and aren’t doing anything shady.)

At the time of writing Brian is using this CD message for his “Exploding Topics Tuesday” newsletter:

#5: Maintaining a Consistent Publishing Schedule

It’s also important to commit to a consistent publishing schedule and then maintain it no matter what. Why?

Because you want your subscribers to develop a habit of reading your newsletter so that it would become a part of their routine.

In fact, you can’t miss a single issue, otherwise, you risk breaking this habit that you worked so hard to build.

Brian himself has sent out over 150 “Exploding Topics Tuesday” issues and hasn’t missed a single one.

This means that “Exploding Topics Tuesday” subscribers know that every Tuesday at 9 AM Eastern they are going to get an email with four trends. Reading it is a part of their weekly routine!

In order to grow your newsletter, you need to drive traffic to its landing page. But how can you do that?

Twitter Marketing

Don’t have much of a marketing budget to speak of?

In that situation, we would advise building a Twitter following first: post high-quality content, retweet other people in your niche and leave thoughtful comments under their tweets every single day.

Then, once you reach the 10,000 follower mark, launch your newsletter, add a link to its landing page to your bio and promote every new issue the day before its release with a teaser snippet.

If you do have a decent marketing budget, you can speed things up by using social media ads to drive traffic to your newsletter’s landing page.

For example, Milk Road, a newsletter that grew to 250,000+ subscribers in under a year, had several paid acquisition channels including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Its co-founders tested a bunch of Facebook ads and found that two types of ads performed well:

Meme ads
Social proof ads

These ads helped Milk Road gain around 50,000 subscribers in its first year, accounting for around 20% of all subscribers the company gained during that time period.

Something to keep in mind here is that running social media ads is a skill so you need to be prepared for a steep learning curve if you haven’t done it before.

If you want to experiment with Facebook ads, consider buying a reputable Facebook ads course on Udemy. If you wait until one of Udemy’s regular sales, you should be able to snag a course like that for less than $20.

Also, make sure to set aside a “learning budget” of at least $1,000 that you are prepared to burn in order to learn how to run ads.

If you can’t afford that then you probably can’t afford to advertise on social media either. In that case, focus on organically growing your following on Twitter.

Finally, if you have the money for it, you might want to consider advertising on other newsletters in your niche.

After all, if someone is already subscribed to a newsletter in your niche, that’s a reliable indication that they:

Like the newsletter format
Are interested in this niche

This means that they might be open to checking out your newsletter if you can manage to create a compelling ad that conveys its value!

You Need a Sales Funnel in Order to Monetize Your Email List!

If all you want is to have an audience that you can share your thoughts with, then you can simply focus on growing your newsletter.

However, if you want to make money from your email list, you need to figure out how to monetize that audience.

In other words: if you want to have a business – not just an email newsletter – you need to build a sales funnel!

Want to Learn How to Build Sales Funnels That CONVERT?

Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.

He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?

His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.

This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.

But you can also get it directly from us for free…

All we ask is that you pay for shipping!

So what are you waiting for? 🧐

Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!

Thanks for reading How To Grow An Email List Starting From Scratch which appeared first on ClickFunnels.

How To Advertise on Google Search: Leveraging The Traffic You Control

John Parkes — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 22:57:30 +0000

The post How To Advertise on Google Search: Leveraging The Traffic You Control appeared first on ClickFunnels.

Google is a great place for customers to find your product or service. However, Google Search Ads can be a bit trickier to understand than other ad platforms like social media.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be intimidating, but once you learn the basics and a few expert tips, you’ll be ready to jump in!

Here at ClickFunnels, we specialize in guiding users through the sales funnel, which includes getting traffic to your funnel.

There are three types of traffic that are discussed in Russell Brunson’s DotCom Secrets.

Traffic you control: from paid ads or other sources where you control how and where the user lands.
Traffic you don’t control: organic traffic or traffic from others’ blogs where you can’t control where the user will land.
Traffic you own: your email lists, customers, and followers that you can send specific content or offers to.

Google Search Ads fall into traffic you control because you decide where users end up on your site.

It is crucial to leverage the traffic you control from your Google Ads campaigns by getting visitors’ email addresses through a squeeze page and turning them into traffic you own.

In this article, we’ll give you some of our best tips to successfully advertise on Google.

But let’s start by covering some of the basics.

Google Ads Basics

There are a couple of things that are important to understand about Google Ads before you dive into the platform.

Targeting

First of all, with SEM, you don’t pay to show ads to certain demographics or groups. You bid on keywords, meaning that when someone inputs a search query that matches your keyword your ad would show up.

When you bid on keywords, you choose which match type you want to bid on. The options are:

Exact Match: the keyword exactly as you typed it.
Broad Match: any search query that includes any word in your keyword in any order
Broad-Modified Match: search queries that include each word in your keyword, but not necessarily in the correct order and with words in between
Phrase Match: variations of the term with your keyword intact but with extra words before or after the keyword

We’ll help you choose which keywords to bid on later, but just keep that in mind.

Structure

The campaign structure in Google Ads can be confusing if you don’t know how they define the terms that they use.

The structure is broken up into the following parts, starting from the highest level:

Account
Campaign
Ad Group
Keywords

We already mentioned Keywords. They’re the level you bid on. So, the more keywords you bid on, the more you would need to spend to show up every time they are searched.

Ad Groups are groups of similar ads and keywords that you choose to combine and share similar targets.

When a user searches any of the keywords in the group, one of the ads in the group will show up at random.

Campaigns are groups of Ad Groups. Each Campaign will cover a broader topic, with the Ad Groups it contains covering the subtopics.

The Account level is to differentiate each business or website, so if you only have one business, you will only have one Account. All of your campaigns for the site will be in the Account.

Bidding

The bids function like an auction, so whoever has the highest bid and the best quality ad gets the top position.

Google defines the ad quality score as a combination of these three characteristics:

Relevance to the keyword
Expected CTR
Landing page experience

These three factors are combined with your bid to determine your Ad Rank.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) on search ads goes down almost exponentially from rank 1 to rank 2 and from 2 to 3, so it is important to rank as high as you can.

In order to ensure you have high quality scores, make sure your ads use the keyword and other words relevant to the topic. Communicate value to the user so that they will want to click on your ad, and craft a landing page that is easy for users to understand.

ClickFunnels is an easy and effective way to craft landing pages that will walk the user through the sale, creating a great user experience.

Tips for Success With Google Ads

Choosing the Right Keywords

The concept of bidding on keywords may be foreign to business owners without experience with SEM, but it is easy to catch on to with the right strategy.

The key to choosing keywords is to put yourself in the user’s shoes. What would you be typing into Google if you need the product or service that you’re selling?

Think of keywords people use to search about the problem that your product or service solves and keywords they would use to search for the solution.

Those are the types of keywords you should be bidding on.

If your business is new, the odds are no one will be searching for your brand name, but you should consider bidding on it if you want to increase brand awareness or if your brand is known to some people who may search for it.

You may also have competitors who bid on your brand name. In that case, you’ll definitely want to reclaim that ad space.

Google Ads has a Keyword Planner tool that you can use to find out how many searches per month a keyword query has and how expensive it is to compete for the terms.

The tool can also help you find more keywords related to your product or service.

Using the Right Landing Pages

The landing page can make or break your Google Ads campaign.

You may have great ads that entice users to click through, but if the page they land on is confusing, they will bounce off the page, go back to the search results and probably click a competitor’s ad.

With Pay-per-Click advertising like Google Ads, you pay every time someone clicks, not every time someone purchases.

So if people are clicking on your ads but then bouncing from your confusing landing page, that would be a horrible waste of money.

This is the exact problem that ClickFunnels solves.

Building landing pages the traditional way requires web development and design, which takes a lot of time, effort, and money.

That’s why a lot of small business owners without large budgets end up with landing pages that confuse users, causing them to bounce and in turn waste their marketing dollars.

ClickFunnels is a software that makes it easy for you to create your own landing pages that look great and are easy for users to understand.

Creating a landing page with ClickFunnels doesn’t require any coding or design, so you can save time for once as a busy entrepreneur!

ClickFunnels landing pages are made to simplify the process of getting leads and making sales.

Each landing page is crafted to ensure that users will not get confused about what to do or where to go to become a customer.

Visitors will be guided through the sales process step-by-step so that you don’t lose customers along the way due to a confusing website.

Turning Traffic You Control into Traffic You Own

As discussed in DotCom Secrets, “Traffic you own is the BEST kind of traffic.”

Owned traffic is your email lists, customers, followers, or anyone else who has given you their contact info so you can now send them newsletters and offers specific to them.

The only way to get owned traffic is by turning the other two types of traffic into traffic you own.

The tips above will help you get users onto your site, but that is only the first step.

ClickFunnels is a way to ensure that users are guided through the sales process, becoming traffic that you own.

For example, when a user clicks on your Google Ad, it can direct them to a squeeze page with a call-to-action that encourages them to enter their email address in exchange for the value you will provide them.

Then, even if they don’t make a purchase today, you can send them email newsletters and offers so that they will remember to come back and make a purchase in the future.

If you aren’t successfully turning traffic you control into traffic you own, you are losing a lot of potential sales over time.

If you’re ready to start leveraging the traffic you control, try ClickFunnels’ 14 day trial!

traffic management Archives - ClickFunnels

How To Grow An Email List Starting From Scratch

Should You Wait Until You Have Something to Sell to Start Building Your Email List?

Case Study: Ryan Holiday’s “Reading List Email” Newsletter (250k+ Subscribers)

Newsletters: The Easiest Way to Grow an Email List from Scratch

Why the Newsletter Format Works So Well

How to Come Up with a Newsletter Concept